Before you or a friend take a crack at fixing your car, read this first!
This article is a paraphrased transcription of an interview with Blake Walker. It remains in conversational language for easy reading.
Photo Credit: ** RCB ** via Compfight cc
Interviewer: Blake, it sounds like there can be major consequences to attempting to fix your vehicle at home or letting a friend try to fix it. Do you have any specific examples you can share?
Blake: One comes to mind immediately because it is recent and it resulted in major expenses for the vehicle owner. I have a regular customer who bought a Ford Bronco and decided that he wanted to fix it up.
He worked on it for a while, and wasn’t getting anywhere. He has a friend that has a friend that is a “mechanic.” This guy started to work on the Bronco, and $5,000 later the Bronco was towed in to us.
The guy replaced the engine and replaced a whole lot of components on it because the vehicle wouldn’t start. It turned out that the vehicle had a bad fuel pump. The owner spent about $5,500, then towed the vehicle in and spent another $625. Now the vehicle runs.
After we got the vehicle running, we did our inspection. We looked at the things that we need to look at, such as coolant temperature and oil pressure and things like that to make sure that everything’s operating okay.
The first red flag that came up is that we didn’t have any oil pressure. Well, this is a new engine. We should have oil pressure.
So we started looking into that side of things. We followed the oil pressure circuit down to the engine block. We found out that it wasn’t hooked up, and that the sensor that’s supposed to be in the engine wasn’t there.
Somebody took a plumbing plug and stuck it into the side of the engine, as opposed to fixing it correctly. The computer monitors the engine’s oil pressure. It needs to see good oil pressure in order for the vehicle to run correctly. The computer wasn’t seeing that.
Because they weren’t sure what to do with the hole, and because they had lost the part and didn’t know what went in there, they just went ahead and put a plug in it. The owner had been dealing with this problem for seven months.
His vehicle was with us for two days, and we got it up and running correctly with good oil pressure. To this guy here that was a $5,000 mistake.
It’s always best to just do a consultation. Talk is cheap.
We’re more than happy to look at a vehicle with you, go over your repair options and lay out different scenarios, so that when you go to make a decision on whether you want to repair your vehicle, or if the repair is right for you, you’ll have all the information.
Once you have that information, you’re able to make a decision that works best for you.
